Facing Reality & Fishing for Sympathy - It's Over

Hey lady!  Anyone would think that it was you who was about to get a cab to Santiago airport and fly 15 hours to cold, wet, misery-stricken Britain.  So lighten up dear.  Anyway, as a final souvenir of the most wonderful holiday of our lives,  I'll have a fillet of your freshest Patagonian toothfish and a punnet of whelks.     Oh my God - what are those?

These are called piures in Chile.  They are sea squirts.   The red blobs come from masses of knobbly tissue which look like the organic cores of daleks.

Gonzo, our guide around a Chilean fish market, explained that piures are famed for their aphrodisiac effect.    I suspect this has worn off by the time one stops retching.

All marine taxa seem to be fair game. Picoroco is a giant barnacle, which I suppose may taste a bit like crab or prawn, being a crustacean.   (For more extreme marine cuisine, I refer you to the food blog of Hummus Boy where you may even feel like leaving your carefully considered opinions about eating whale meat in HB´s comment box!)

Anyway, I am sure a plate of piures would be no worse than the in-flight meal which Iberia has planned for us later.

Flight over the mountains, glaciers and fjords of the northern Patagonian Andes in Chile.

This is the final post from South America.  After the trauma of the return to Britain is under control, there will be an extra post on the best and worst places we visited, hotels, restaurants, recommendations etc - and an illustrated bird list (which is for my own amusement).